South Africa coverage

What the South Africa numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 42 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 10 Mbps, is the one that matters. It is the speed in the worst tenth of the day, when the cell above the station is full and everybody around you is on it too. A country with a high median and a low floor is a country that works beautifully right up until the moment you actually need it.

If the trip depends on video calls or tethering, plan around the busy figure rather than the typical one.

What happens in South Africa when the network is busy

Congestion is not a fault, it is a Tuesday evening. The question is what your eSIM can do about it, and for most travel eSIMs the answer is nothing: one wholesale agreement per country, one network, and no way out except buying a second eSIM from somebody else while standing in the street.

Here, Orbislo traffic runs over Vodacom and MTN. When the network you are on degrades we move you to another one, mid trip, without you asking, and tell you afterwards rather than interrupting you at the time.

Mobile operators in South Africa

• Vodacom: Vodacom paid the most in South Africa's first spectrum auction in March 2022, R5.38 billion for 20 MHz at 700 MHz, 80 MHz at 2600 MHz and 10 MHz at 3500 MHz.
• MTN: MTN spent R5.15 billion in the March 2022 auction on 20 MHz at 800 MHz, 40 MHz at 2600 MHz and 40 MHz at 3500 MHz, the largest block of 3500 MHz spectrum any bidder bought at that sale.
• Telkom, rain, Cell C and Liquid: In the 2022 auction Telkom paid R2.11 billion for 20 MHz at 800 MHz and 22 MHz at 3500 MHz, and rain R1.43 billion for 20 MHz each at 700 and 2600 MHz. Cell C took 10 MHz and Liquid 4 MHz at 3500 MHz.
• Vodacom: Vodacom South Africa had 39.1 million prepaid and 7.0 million contract customers at 31 March 2026, and 28.2 million of the smart devices on its network were 4G or 5G capable.
• MTN: MTN South Africa ended 2025 with 40.6 million subscribers, of whom 29.7 million were prepaid and 4.6 million postpaid, and 22.0 million active data users.
• Cell C: Cell C began moving its customers onto rival networks in January 2021, contract and broadband customers to Vodacom and prepaid customers to MTN, while decommissioning its own towers over three years. A Cell C line largely rides on those two networks.
• rain: rain is a licensed mobile network operator running a national 4G and 5G network on its own spectrum at 700 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2600 MHz and 3600 MHz, alongside one of the country's largest 5G home internet networks.

Older networks in South Africa

• Government had set 31 December 2027 as the deadline to switch off 2G and 3G, but in 2025 the communications department said it would no longer impose a date and would leave the timing to each operator, area by area.

5G in South Africa

• Vodacom launched mobile 5G on 4 May 2020 on 20 sites in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town, using 50 MHz of temporary 3.5 GHz spectrum that the regulator released during the COVID-19 state of disaster.
• rain launched what it calls Africa's first commercial standalone 5G network, built on a dedicated 5G core rather than on a 4G one.
• 5G reached 58.0 percent of South Africans in 2025, up from 46.6 percent a year earlier, according to operator returns collected by the regulator.
• Rural 5G is thin. In 2025 it reached 74 percent of rural Gauteng but only 7 percent of rural Eastern Cape and 13 percent of rural Northern Cape. Urban 5G ranged from 89 percent in the Western Cape to 38 percent in the Free State.

Network notes for South Africa

• In 2025, 3G reached 99.85 percent of the population and 4G 99.5 percent, but mobile broadband reached only 82.1 percent of the country's land area, so parts of the countryside have no mobile data signal at all.
• South Africa counted 117.3 million mobile subscriptions in September 2025, of which 96.5 million were prepaid and 20.8 million postpaid, with prepaid falling about 1 percent in the year.
• When four West African submarine cables, WACS, SAT-3, ACE and MainOne, failed on 14 March 2024, Vodacom blamed an undersea cable for disruption. The impact on South Africa was smaller than in most affected countries, which was credited to its nine submarine cables.